Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 14, 2016

I’ll never forget the first time Jessica Ennis-Hill blew me away. It was 2009 and we were following her progress at the world championships in Berlin. Her buildup to the event had been horrible – missing the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games with a broken ankle and having to retrain for the long jump using a different leg for take off. We knew she was in brilliant form, despite the setbacks, but in the shot put she stuttered. Two weak throws and her points tally suddenly looked shaky. Then, on her final attempt, she gathered herself together and pulled out a personal best.

That’s Jess all over. Queen of the bounceback. Determination off the scale. Winner of five golds, three silvers and one bronze. Some people celebrate that kind of moment by punching the air, or leering in the face of their opponents. Jess just gave a quiet little skip, clapped her hands together and got on with the job.
Jessica Ennis-Hill retires from athletics: ‘I want to leave my sport on a high’

When, a year out from London 2012, and with her face already plastered across the nation (including on a billboard by the chip shop at the end of her road, lest she forget) other athletes began asking for sports psychologists, Jess didn’t bother. She got a Labrador puppy and ploughed on with the hill runs.

This might not be Kurt Warner going from stocking grocery shelves in Iowa to winning a Super Bowl. But it’s the feel-good story of the year in the NFL, the story of a successful team with a GM unafraid to take risks and coaches who know what they’re looking for in a quarterback, one whose skills translate to pro football. Namely, poise, intelligence, accuracy—and the understanding that a strong supporting cast can make a fundamentally sound quarterback look pretty good.

“You couldn’t write the script,” says Jacob Schmidt, a former teammate of Siemian’s and now the director of player development for Northwestern football. “It is such a the stars aligned thing. You have what most would call a mediocre senior season, and then you blow out your ACL, and then you’re going to go to the NFL? How?”

Not just that, but starting for the reigning Super Bowl champions. Schmidt asks the right question: How in the world did this happen?

… In short, Kanté was something special at Leicester, almost a one-off with his indefatigable running, and so it hardly comes as a surprise that the champions have not been quite the same team without him. They miss the defensive screen that he provided in front of the back four and also his ability to pinch possession and provide the springboard to break with such alacrity.

Statistics confirm what most would suspect in a post-Kanté Leicester team. The average number of tackles and interceptions per game have fallen significantly, from 22 to 16 and 19 to 14 respectively, and Kanté’s departure for around £30m has contributed heavily to that. He averaged 4.7 tackles and 4.2 interceptions per game at Leicester – the highest in the Premier League in both categories. Daniel Amartey, who has been handed the task of trying to replace Kanté in the centre of Leicester’s midfield, averages 1.5 and 1.2 in comparison.

As for high-intensity running – sprints registered by Opta at above 25.2km/h – Kanté completed, on average, 56 of those per game at Leicester. Amartey, in contrast, is making 41.5 each match.

On the Thursday before his third NFL start, an eventual 31–17 devastation of the Bears, Cowboys rookie quarterback Dak Prescott parked his Escalade in his driveway and entered his three-story, three-bedroom suburban condominium. After an early-bird 5:30 p.m. dinner he faced the type of dilemma familiar to burgeoning NFL stars: Kanye West was playing in downtown Dallas at the American Airlines Center, and one of the few companies Prescott endorses had sent him some sweet seats in Section 105, just left of stage.

Prescott did the math aloud: Kanye will go on after 9. The show will last a few hours, which means getting home after midnight. The decision was clear. He ­offered the tickets to his childhood friend, Cobi Griffin, who declined. So Dak kicked back in a recliner, Cobi sprawled on the couch and the two spent the night flipping between a Texans–Patriots game and Clemson–Georgia Tech. “I wanted to go a little bit,” Prescott said of the concert. “But I just think about the perception of it all. And I love my sleep.”

… Training schedules were changed to mirror kick-off times. Players were instructed to move within 15 miles of the training ground. And a high-intensity playing style – which the hipsters call ‘gegenpressing’, Wagner prefers ‘Terriers identity’ – was vigorously enforced.

‘It has worked!’ exclaims Wagner, a UEFA Cup-winning striker with Schalke and former USA international who was born to an American father but considers himself all German.

‘Everything you do as a manager, you must trust. But, ultimately, you work with humans – and you never know how they’ll react.’

Mike Tomlin puts the Steelers through some of the most physical practices in the NFL, said Ben Roethlisberger, and the quarterback believes that may be why they have so many injuries.

“We have a lot of injuries,” Roethlisberger said on his radio spot on 93.7 The Fan Tuesday. “I think a lot of our stuff stems from we’re one of the most physical football teams in training camp, in practice, you know. We do more hitting than most teams do and more [practices in] pads.”

Of course they do, and of course they don’t.

Putting a student at the centre of their own learning seems like fundamental pedagogy. The Constructivist approach to education emphasises the need for knowledge to reassembled in the mind of the learner, and the related impossibility of its direct transmission from the mind of the teacher. Believe this, and student input into how they learn must follow.

At the same time, we know there is a deep neurobiological connection between the machinery of reward in our brain, and that of learning. Both functions seem to be entangled in the subcortical circuitry of a network known as the basal ganglia. It’s perhaps not surprising that curiosity, which we all know personally to be a powerful motivator of learning, activates the same subcortical circuitry involved in the pleasurable anticipation of reward. Further, curiosity enhances memory, even for things you learn while your curiosity is aroused about something else.

More and more fitness trackers that are worn on the wrist feature heart rate monitors in the name of helping you stay healthy. But results of a new study by a team of Cleveland Clinic physicians shows that they are not as accurate as chest-worn heart monitors.

In a research letter published today in the journal JAMA Cardiology, the team, led by cardiac surgeon Marc Gillinov, MD, also found that some of the wrist-worn monitors were more accurate than others.

… Body Labs was founded on the premise that if someone takes a handful of ordinary measurements of their body, the remaining measurements — ones that you’d need to get a nearly perfect fit for some article of clothing — are predictable.

Imagine if, in addition to all the other metadata that we’re collecting about our bodies, we also had a Body Labs profile — a 3D model — that we could transmit to an etailer or even directly to a manufacturer. Or, if we don’t have one, we could enter that handful of measurements into an etailer’s site and then in turn, that etailer could transmit those numbers to Body Labs via its Blue API where they’d be converted into a more complete measurement 3D model. What happens next is essentially still up for discussion from the apparel industry’s point of view. For example, the etailer could present the buyer with only those options that are a near perfect match for the buyer’s model. Maybe the etailer offers additional options like “skin-tight” or “baggify-that” and, through the API, the buyer gets a “baggy profile” if s/he prefers baggy clothing.

Not every company can boast that its headquarters has a full-size basketball court. But for ShotTracker LLC, the added amenity is vital.

ShotTracker’s new headquarters in Merriam is 20 times the size of its former space in Overland Park. Before moving into the new space in April, the startup had been borrowing other people’s gyms to test its technology, which automates the tracking of a basketball player’s performance statistics.

The NCAA Division I Council last week suggested that college football teams don’t have enough coaches. It proposed that each team add a 10th full-time assistant coach.

The average assistant coach’s salary in the Pac-12 is close to $300,000.

Arizona’s Rich Rodriguez agreed. Why wouldn’t he? “With (all) the revenue, I don’t know why they didn’t address it earlier,” he said.

College football has become a sport of such excess that beyond USC’s nine full-time assistant coaches, it has 18 “others” on Clay Helton’s staff.

In only Mauricio Pochettino’s second game in English football the Argentine was paid an astounding compliment by the greatest manager the country has witnessed.

Pochettino had guided Southampton to a goalless draw with Everton in his debut match and when they visited Old Trafford next the afternoon ended in defeat, but was the start of something new.

‘For the first 30 minutes I thought we were fantastic, we played really well. But in the second half Southampton have been the best team to play here this season,’ Sir Alex Ferguson said.

Analytics is a way of thinking,” says Brentford’s co-director of football Rasmus Ankersen as the Championship club opens its doors to Telegraph Sport to offer an insight into how they want to “out-think the opposition” and plot a path into the Premier League.

The fact that Ankersen is a “co” director of football, a role he shares with Phil Giles, is part of that difference at the club owned by Brentford fan Matthew Benham – who established Smartodds, a business based on using data to predict the outcome of sports events to customers including professional gamblers.

Official rankings are the most common measure of success in professional women’s tennis. Despite their importance for earning potential and tournament seeding, little is known about ranking trajectories of female players and their influence on career success. Our objective was to conduct a comprehensive study of the career progression of elite female tennis talent. The study examined the ranking trajectories of the top 250 female professionals between 1990 and 2015. Using regression modelling of yearly peak rankings, we found a strong association between the shape of the ranking trajectory and the highest career ranking earned. Players with the highest career peak ranking were the youngest when first ranked. For example, top 10 players were first ranked at age 15.5 years (99% CI = 14.8–15.9), 1.2 years (99% CI = 0.8–1.5) earlier than top 51–100 players. Top 10 players were also ranked in the top 100 longer than other players, holding a top 100 ranking until a mean age of 29.0 years (99% CI = 27.8–30.3) compared with age 24.4 years (99% CI = 23.7–25.2) for top 51–100 players. Ranking trajectories were more distinct with respect to player age than years from first ranking. The present study’s findings will be instructive for players, coaches, and administrators in setting goals and assessing athlete development in women’s tennis.

… Like most of his generation, Arsenal’s Iwobi, 20, grew up with video games. He played soccer, too, of course, both as part of his formal sporting education — with a youth team near his family home and then, from age 9, at the Gunners’ academy — and as part of its informal equivalent, the technical, intense matches on the five-a-side field in the East London neighborhood where he grew up.

Both informed the player Iwobi would become. If his academy coaches refined his talent, instilling discipline and dedication, he attributes his close control, for example, to playing in the five-a-side “cage,” where any mistake is pounced on by “bigger boys who want to bully you off the ball.”

His taste for video games, though, should also be credited with playing a role. As with Pirlo and Nesta, Iwobi’s favorite team in FIFA was, as a rule, Barcelona — thanks to Ronaldinho, the Brazilian playmaker with the vivid imagination and the mischievous grin. “He had all these tricks, things even he wouldn’t try in normal life,” Iwobi said.